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Hilde Gueden (born Hulda Geiringer) was among the extraordinary young Mozart/Strauss singers who emerged from Vienna immediately after WWII and who dominated Mozart performance well into the 1960s. Gueden's considerable ease in the top register destined her to sing the lighter roles of Richard Strauss and she made a mark in operetta as well, achieving celebrity in the works of Johann Strauss, Lehár, and others. She was a trim, sparkling personality on stage; as a Decca artist, she left numerous recordings of her best roles.

Of Austrian, Italian, and Hungarian ancestry, Gueden's parents mixed finance and the arts: Gueden's father was a banker, while her mother was an actress. Gueden began her musical training at age seven with piano lessons, and began to study voice seven years later. When she was only 16, she was brought to the attention of operetta composer Robert Stolz who offered her a part in his Servus, servus; Gueden's performance immediately endeared her to the Viennese public. During the performance run the young soprano studied ballet privately and took courses in acting at the Max Reinhardt Academy, all with an eye toward the operatic stage.

With the Anschluss, Gueden escaped to Switzerland where she auditioned for the Zurich Opera. Engaged on the spot, Gueden made her debut in 1939 as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro. Numerous other roles came in the aftermath of her success and she remained in Zurich for two years. Family matters called her back to Vienna in 1941 and, finding herself unable to leave her home country, she accepted an engagement in Munich where she appeared first with conductor Clemens Krauss as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Composer Richard Strauss attended a performance of Così fan tutte and, struck by the beauty and splendid vocal resources of the young singer, urged Gueden to study the role of Sophie in his Der Rosenkavalier. After taking his advice, Gueden made her Italian debut as Sophie at the Rome Opera in December 1942. Given her intense dislike for the Nazi regimes in both Austria and Germany, Gueden elected to remain in Italy. When the Nazis occupied that country, she simply withdrew from performing for the duration of the war, seeking shelter first in Venice, then in a rural town near Milan.

Following the conclusion of hostilities, Gueden returned to Austria and was invited to the Salzburg Festival in 1946 where she debuted in the signature role of Zerlina. That same year, she was engaged by the Vienna Staatsoper where she remained a treasured artist until 1973. In 1947, she sang at Covent Garden for the first time and, in 1951, she began a relationship with the Metropolitan Opera which lasted for nine seasons and embraced more than 100 performances in 13 roles. For the Metropolitan, she created the role of Anne Truelove in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in a production coming shortly after the work's Venice premiere. Among other roles in New York, Gueden sang both Musetta and Mimì in La bohème, Zerlina, Susanna, Sophie, Zdenka, and Rosalinde.

At Salzburg, Gueden offered a saucy performance of the title role in Strauss' Die Schweigsame Frau in 1959, and, in Vienna, a radiant Daphne in 1964, both productions captured on disc. Her cherishable Sophie was preserved on commercial recording under Erich Kleiber.

Igor Markevitch was a leading conductor, known for brilliant performances, especially of twentieth century music. He was also a composer who attracted some interest in his own day. His parents left Kiev when he was two years old. Markevitch was brought up in Vevey, Switzerland. He took piano lessons from his father and then with Paul Loyonnet and also started to compose. The pianist Alfred Cortot saw some of his piano compositions and recommended that the boy study in Paris. In 1925 he enrolled in Cortot's piano class at the École Normale de Musique. He studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition with Nadia Boulanger. The ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned him to write a piano concerto and a ballet. The concerto premiered in London in 1929, but Diaghilev's death in August of that year caused Markevitch to stop work on the ballet, instead recycling materials from it into a cantata, premiered with great success in Paris on June 4, 1930. Later that year, another new work, a Concerto Grosso, received even greater acclaim. The ballet, Rébus, was first staged in December 1931, and was hailed as a great composition. The next ballet, L'envol d'Icare (June 1933), was once again highly praised. But after this Markevitch began to receive criticism for his use of unrelieved dissonance and his novel use of instruments.

Meanwhile, Markevitch had begun to conduct, debuting on the podium with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1930. He studied conducting with Hermann Scherchen in 1935. His composing activities dropped off as he increased his conducting. He spent World War II in Italy, having acquired Italian citizenship. In 1944 he was appointed music director of the Maggio Musicale Orchestra in Florence. He began conducting full time, coming into demand as a guest conductor, and held a variety of directorships or principal conducting appointments with the Stockholm Symphony Orchestra (1952-1955), the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (1956-1960), the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra (1957-1958), the Concerts Lamoureux of Paris (1957-1961), the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra (1965-1969), the Monte Carlo Orchestra (1967), and the orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome (1967-1972). His American debut was with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1955. He also began giving conducting master classes, especially in Monte Carlo, from 1969.

He was known for his performance of the Russian repertory and twentieth century music. He had a quick temper, reflected in his music in sharp emotional shifts, yet the music was meticulously prepared and nearly always followed the composer's directions with exceptional care. In the late '90s, his recordings came back into demand in re-release, and even his compositions were finding a small but interested market and were praised anew for their originality.